“Unconquerable
warriors of the damned!” screams the US poster for War Of The
Zombies. “SEE the undead cross swords with the living! SEE the
goddess of the night whose gaze mummifies men!” Sounds to me like
the premise for one of the most incredible horror films ever. Imagine
then your reaction when the film unspools and it’s YET ANOTHER
ITALIAN SWORD AND SANDAL MOVIE! As if American theatre screens and
televisions weren’t inundated enough in the early to mid Sixties
with peplum-themed product, the films’ distributors – in War Of
The Zombies’ instance, American International Pictures – were
forced, as the peplum cycle was grinding towards its demise, to primp
up or flat-out lie about their content.

Luckily War Of The
Zombies from 1964 is not just another Sons of Hercules muscle-fest,
but an ambitious fantasy-horror ranking comfortably near Mario Bava’s
Hercules In The Haunted World and Riccardo Freda’s The Witches
Curse. In War Of The Zombies, however, there’s no Hercules, Samson
or Ursus as the beefcake-flavoured focal point. Instead the film’s
hero is Roman centurion Gaius, sent without his troops to the
troubled Salmacia province to investigate Rome’s missing tribute.
In the opening sequence Roman troops carrying treasure from Salmacia
back to Rome are butchered by barbarians, stripped of their armour
and their bodies stolen by deformed scavengers. It appears the entire
province, including its weak Roman pretern Letitius and his
double-crossing snake of a wife Tullia, is under the spell of a
devilish cult dedicated to the Moon Goddess and “daughter of Isis”,
whose Oath of Blood is performed under the blazing high beam of its
enormous stone bust’s single Third Eye. Through Letitius’ slave
girl Rhama, held in a trance by the cult’s high priest Aderbad,
Gaius learns of its plan to revive the spirits of the dead Roman
soldiers and lead them into an ultimate showdown against their own
living comrades.

Sounds incredible,
and to a certain extent it is. This IS a peplum, let’s not forget,
and as such there are dry patches of wooden dialogue and
stiff-as-corpses emoting to suffer. Once we wade through the
regulation courtships and betrayals, however, we’re presented with
the payoff: a magnificent low-rent but surprisingly effective battle
between the living and the dead, smothered with superimposed colour
swirls of saturated reds and blues (Mario Bava’s favourite palette
for supernatural effects). Rather than rotting corpses, the Moon
Goddess’ army is presented as ghostly figures, their
otherworldliness underscored by slow motion cameras and an eerie
echo-laden soundtrack. Just as impressive is the over-the-top
performance of their leader, high priest Aderbad, played by John Drew
Barrymore (son of John Barrymore, father of Drew Barrymore) in one of
his numerous Italian film appearances between numerous cocktails in
the early Sixties. Quasi-psychedelic, and several notches above your
ordinary Italian sword and sandal, is the zombie-themed peplum
chiller Rome Against Rome, or War Of The Zombies.

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HERR LEAVOLD

Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a film-maker, published author, researcher, film festival curator, musician, and above all, unrepentant and voracious fan of the pulpier aspects of genre cinema. His writing has been published globally in mainstream magazines, academic journals and underground cinema fanzines, for the last two decades.

Leavold toured the world with his feature length documentary The Search For Weng Weng (2013). His ten years of research on genre filmmaking in the Philippines formed the basis of Mark Hartley's documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (released internationally in 2010), on which Leavold is also Associate Producer, and he has since been recognized both in the Philippines and abroad as the foremost authority in his area of expertise, teaching Philippine film history at university level in Australia, the United States, and throughout the Philippines. Leavold teamed with Daniel Palisa to co-direct The Last Pinoy Action King (2015), both a feature-length documentary on the late Filipino action idol Rudy Fernandez, and a dissection of film royalty, politics, privilege, idolatry, and the Philippines’ pyramid of power.

He is currently shooting two new feature-length documentaries – The Most Beautiful Creatures On The Skin Of The Earth (also with Palisa), the third in his Filipino trilogy, about erotic cinema under Marcos; and Pub, a history of the vibrant St Kilda music scene as told through its most outrageous progeny, Fred Negro. Both films are due for release in 2018.